Last week news broke that 15 year-old Phoebe Prince killed herself after months of harassment and bullying by her classmates at a South Hadley, MA high school. School administrators initially denied knowing anything about it, even though Prince’s mother had complained to school officials, and a renowned bullying expert had been called in to consult [...]

I asked my trainer and owner of Recreate Fitness, Nathan, if he would coach a “cross-fit club” with my 5th grade boys from the I Have a Dream foundation. It’s one of my kids and leadership clubs I’ve been doing. It’s definitely been fun, but also challenging. Some of the games and activities require technique, [...]

The last decade is a strong contender for the title “the decade of dubious leadership.” From the handling of Katrina to the collapse of the banking system, it was a disastrous decade for leadership. Ironically, it was also a decade during which more was written on leadership than ever before. I’m hoping for a better [...]

What’s the solution for solving the health care mess? Global warming? The economy? OK, these are bad examples, obviously if we knew, and if it were that easy, they’d be solved. But the question I want to ask is, why do we wait to tackle our problems until they are so complicated, so messy, so [...]

I’m getting clearer on what this blog is about. I have started to call it, to myself at least, Learning and Leading. While leadership and power is a main focus, looking over the posts, I see that a great deal of what I write about involves the problems of learning to lead. And that reminds [...]

The Process Work Institute is about to begin the process of applying for regional accreditation. My job is to help spearhead this process, and one of the tasks is to create assessments – of the programs, of student progress, of individual courses, and of faculty. I’ve been up to my elbows this summer studying the [...]

There’s a lot of interesting research out there on excellence and superior performance. What accounts for superior performance? Why are some people superstars at what they do, and others just average? The question is pretty interesting, not only for what it says about excellence, but more generally, what it says about learning and development. Gladwell’s [...]

My blog stats tell me that my most viewed post, by an extraordinary amount, is Power = force + distance/time.  Don’t remember it? I barely do either. It’s a little “back soon” post I wrote during a busy period, feeling guilty for not having written much.
It’s ironic (and humbling) that the most read post isn’t [...]

Remember this Nike ad of Charles Barkley?

Barkley went on:
I don’t believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models…. It’s not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn’t like it, they said, “Don’t [...]

Last month, I spoke about the problem of transfer and ‘expert syndrome’ -  over extending one’s sense of expertise to the point of enacting the expert role in fields in which one is not qualified. The deeper problem is one of self-reflection, really seeing who you are: on one hand, not confusing yourself with your [...]